Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira has published the article “Invoking ethnic identity in the service of right-wing rhetoric: an analysis of 2022 Latina republican candidates in South Texas,” with Dr. Arthur Soto-Vásquez of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in Communication, Culture, and Critique. The essay examines campaign ads from three Latina GOP candidates in South Texas, in which Moreira and Soto-Vásquez identified the strategic deployment of conservative ethnic identity that disavows racialized identity through anti-immigrant rhetoric. Instead of moderating anti-immigration discourse, as has been suggested by observers on how to attract Latine voters, these candidates instead redirect the immigrant threat narrative towards other subgroups of Latines. The article can be found here.

The Communication Studies Department was well-represented at the 2024 Biennial Public Address Conference. This is a highly-selective, invitation-only conference that showcases scholarship and responses from leading scholars in Rhetoric and Communication Studies. The University of Texas at Austin hosted this conference September 22-25. Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala (LB) was one of the eight invited plenary speakers to the conference. She delivered an address, titled “Caste is not a metaphor,” as a call to the field to grapple with its ignorance of caste, and to reckon with how caste bolsters “model minority” and white supremacist discourses. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira responded to Dr. Angela Aguayo’s plenary, “Youth Production as Public Address,” in which she articulated a series of questions regarding the potential of networked space to produce liberatory content. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Jaishikha Nautiyal participated in a panel titled “Anti-DEI legislation in Texas” and presented her work on “anaerobic rhetoric,” in light of the anti-DEI legislation in Florida, based on a forthcoming publication in Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira has published the essay “Working for the miracle: A critical, visual analysis of Disney’s Encanto,” along with co-authors Raisa Alvarado of California State University, San Bernardino and Carlos Flores of California State University, Sacramento, in the International Journal of Communication.The essay proposes a visual analysis of Encanto, with particular attention to the cultural tensions and ideologies that surround the film, including paratexts produced by Encanto fans via the streaming platform TikTok. Although the film remains notable for its stylistic displays of Latine identities and experiences, its visual choices remain situated in western, settler-colonial ideologies of oligarchical governance, mestizaje, and postracism. The visual analysis of Encanto and its related paratexts contributes to scholarship on the labor of cultural translators on behalf of Disney, expanding it to include unaffiliated Disney audiences who digitally articulate histories of imperialism, displacement, and their contemporary counterparts for public audiences. The International Journal of Communication is an open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is consistently among the top quartile of journals in communication with highest citation metrics worldwide. The essay can be read here. 

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira presented two papers at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference, held in Denver, CO, May 23-27. Moreira presented the essay “The Place of Blackness in U.S. Constructions of Latinidad,” in which she investigates Anzaldúa’s legacy of mestizaje and hybridity as foundational for the absence of studies about Blackness and antiblackness in Latine Communication Studies. Additionally, she presented on the failures of media literacy and “informational bootstraps” approaches in the classroom in the face of growing monetized and organized disinformation campaigns.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira was among 30 scholars invited to participate in the Viral Movements Symposium, hosted at Penn State on May 14 and 15. The symposium was organized by Lisa Flores, the Josephine Berry Weiss Chair of the Humanities, and featured scholars from the humanities and life sciences to discuss the topics of (im)mobility, (mis)information, and (mis)management.